Books: The Lady & the Hatchet

VESSEL OF WRATH by Robert Lewis Taylor. 373 pages. New American Library. $6.95.

In the 55 years since the death of Carry Nation, numerous biographers have sifted the implausible legend that was her life. All of them, by necessity, consulted the same primary source: The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, her autobiography, revised seven times during the author’s lifetime until the bridge between fact and fancy simply collapsed. Carry’s lively imagination was impatient with the truth—which was crowded out of the book anyway by endless non-sequitur quotations from her favorite authors, Shakespeare and God.

Like Mrs. Nation herself, her first biographers tended to take their subject overseriously, as a moral force whose famous hatchet splintered a national institution that was richly deserving of demolition: the saloon. This new book makes no such mistake. Robert Lewis Taylor is a skilled biographer (W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes) as well as an incorrigible parodist (The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters) who treats her with the irreverence that is her due.

Letter of the Law. How Carry Nation conceived her passion against drink is a matter for more sobersided. chroniclers than Taylor. Some ascribe it to her grandfather’s habit, back on the Kentucky homestead, of swilling brandy before the cock crowed; others to the fact that Carry’s first husband, Dr. Charles Gloyd, was a professional drunk who reeled down the aisle to marry her and, in the few years left before they embalmed him, never sobered up.

Whatever the origin of her life’s impulse, Carry began obeying it in Kansas in 1899 when she was 52. The state was then legally dry. Liquor could be dispensed only for “medical, scientific and mechanical” purposes—an injunction liberally interpreted by the cafes, drugstores and Blind Tigers of the time. After remarrying a kind of jack-of-all professions named David Nation, who was occasionally a lawyer, doctor, journalist and innkeeper and chronically a failure, Carry went on the warpath. Commencing in the town of Medicine Lodge, Carry’s hatchet proceeded to enforce the letter of the law wherever she found Hawkeyes slaking their thirst. It was her habit to spend the eve of battle walking around on her knees—a kinetic form of prayer—sometimes anointing herself with fireplace ashes. From these rituals, Carry apparently drew prodigious strength. While raiding the Senate Bar in Topeka on Feb. 5, 1901, she disarmed a pistol-toting bartender (his two shots missed) and pulverized a $500 back-bar mirror. When an iron cash register stood proof against her hatchet, she lifted it overhead, carried it outside and smashed it on the street.

No prairie state could long contain such an irresistible force. Eventually, Mrs. Nation’s arrest record logged entries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Bayonne and Coney Island. The forces arrayed against her were formidable, and formidably unchivalrous. At the hands of defensive saloonkeepers, Carry suffered nearly as much damage as she dealt. One annoyed publican in Bangor, Me., knocked her down four times, and a gold breast pin was molded for the Topeka bartender’s wife who slugged Carry in the eye.

Beyond the Pale. Taylor’s biography fully illuminates a woman whose antipathy was by no means limited to booze. “Stated loosely,” the author writes, “Mrs. Nation was against alcohol, tobacco, sex, politics, government (national, state and local), the Masonic Lodge, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan.” At one time or another, she delivered haymakers against them all. “I never saw anything that needed a rebuke, or exhortation, or warning,” she explained, “but that I felt it my place to meddle with it.”

Vessel of Wrath is a splendid tribute to its destructive subject, even though Parodist Taylor is outmatched. Carry’s memory is secure from parody. She was a woman so extravagantly beyond the normal pale that even her avowed enemies, the whisky dispensers, had trouble believing she was real. Ultimately they became her most devoted allies, hiring bands to accompany her on lecture tours, subscribing to her house organ, The Smasher’s Mail, and cheerfully providing the beer kegs that she mounted on street corners all over the country.